


Fine in the Morning

by non_canonical



Series: Our Lips Must Always be Sealed [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Hiatus, Illnesses, M/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-26
Updated: 2012-02-26
Packaged: 2017-10-31 19:06:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/347406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/non_canonical/pseuds/non_canonical
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's not Sherlock Holmes any more, not since he died.  But he still clings to that stubborn Holmes pride.</p><p>(Part of a series, but can be read as a stand-alone.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fine in the Morning

It's stifling under the covers; Sherlock kicks them off.  The room is sweltering, suffocating.  His feet stick to the wooden floor: the cleaner was careless, in a hurry to get home.  A sick child – son or daughter? He should know, but he can't see it.  It doesn't matter: he needs air.

He shoulders the curtain aside; the midday glare stabs into his eyes, searing through the optic nerve right into his brain.  The window latch is antiquated.  Wouldn't keep a competent burglar out for more than a minute; wouldn't keep him out.  It shouldn't be giving him this much trouble, but his bloody hands keep shaking.

Finally: the catch gives, the window springs open.  His lungs heave in hot, wet air that gives no relief; he chokes on exhaust fumes.  Tang of salt and rust on the heavy breeze.   _La Blanche_ , they call it – Algiers the White.  All he's seen is concrete and grime.

Six paces over to the window – they've taken it out of him.  Seven wobbly steps back, and his legs dump him onto the mattress.  His skin's burning, pulled taut across aching joints.  His tongue feels swollen, clumsy in the parched and shrunken confines of his mouth.

Sherlock grabs a bottle of coke from the bedside table.  Crack and hiss as the plastic yields; sickly synthetic fizz in his throat.  Vile, but he drinks it all the same.  It seems to settle the stomach – why? The acidity? The sugar content? Or simply the placebo effect? – and thank god that particular threat is receding.  

Finding a doctor would attract attention, and he's already vulnerable.  He'll be fine; has to be fine.  He needs to take out the Algerians before they even suspect his existence.  Quickly, too, now that Mycroft has insisted on beginning the search for Monsieur Dubois and his associates.  Such overbearing concern, maddening in its sincerity.  And if a part of Sherlock wants that – wants to run to his brother for help – he's not a child any more.  He can do this on his own.

He stretches out a hand, pulls familiar, battered nylon closer.  The rucksack is his lifeline, his insurance.  Always in reach; always ready.  But not this time.  He's been careless: his phone's over on the desk; his passports are in the safe.  He stands – a bad idea.  The floor pitches; his vision blurs, static closing in from the edges.  He sits down before he falls.  Hypotension, bradycardia – it's been coming on for days, his heart slowing, limbs fighting their own inertia.  His body capitulating, cell by cell.

He's sweating.  Fever, probably – impossible to be sure without a thermometer.  Typhoid, maybe malaria.  He's only been here forty-eight hours, so contracted somewhere else, but where? When? Athens, Mumbai.  Incubation periods: seven days – no, ten.  He doesn't know.  He just can't focus, and he doesn't have the energy to care.

Stomach cramps again: fiercer now, sharper.  Twisting through his abdomen and doubling him over.  Sherlock breathes through the worst of it, then braces and swings his feet up onto the bed.  He's going nowhere.  Disgust mixes with the pain: his body is betraying him.  Again.

His fingers clench around the memory of cut glass.  Whisky: molten in the firelight; metallic bite of iodine.  It does nothing to steady his vocal cords, his hands.  And John's face.   _John's face: I don't have friends_.  And he doesn't.  Not any more.  There's a different name on each of those passports, and none of them is his.  He's left himself behind, amputated his past.  But, like a phantom limb, he can still feel it.  It still hurts.  His sluggish pulse beats faster at the thought of what he's left behind.  Is this how John feels? How does he bear it?

Sherlock sags back onto the pillows; the bed tilts, seesaws, and he's slipping.  He clutches the mattress, but it's whirling – the bed, the room, or maybe just his head.  He squeezes his eyes shut, and he's flying, falling, cut loose from gravity.  A queasy lurch; his eyes jar open.  There's a water stain on the ceiling – painted twice in the last year, but it keeps leaching through – and he anchors himself to that fixed point.

But it's hard to concentrate, to hold his gaze steady while his body keeps on spinning.  And he's tired, so tired.  His eyes are determined to close, and he doesn't fight them.  A rush of vertigo, but it's gentler now, like riding on a tidal swell: a slow rise and fall; rocking, rocking.  He's floating, but his body's heavy.  He drifts; he sinks.

 

Darkness; cold.  Goose flesh ripples down Sherlock's arms, his back; a shudder burrows into his bones.  The curtains billow, but the window is a long way in the unsteady dark.  He drags the blanket up from the bottom of the bed, curls tight inside his nest of cotton and wool.  A cocoon – a womb.  Primal human instinct; John would understand it.  Mycroft might disdain the need for it, but Sherlock knows how his brother reaches out for comfort in the night.

Sherlock hugs the covers closer and imagines Mycroft's bulk hot against his back, his thighs.  He breathes as though he can pull his brother down into his lungs: sweat and cologne – faint zest of neroli, rich basenotes of sandalwood and vanilla.  Warmth blooms inside his chest, faint but spreading, and his body starts to thaw.  He closes his eyes.

 

Sherlock flinches awake; holds still, pain searing deep into his gut, until finally it's intolerable and he has to roll onto his back.  He palpates his abdomen – his hand is trembling again; he ignores it – and he winces a breath through gritted teeth.  It's not appendicitis: he traces the furrow above his right hip.  Nine years old; his first time inside an ambulance.  Mycroft, taking his hand.  Embarrassment, tangling with the fear.  Mycroft: refusing to be separated, knowing him well enough to keep hold even when he protested.  Mycroft's fingers squeezing his when he woke afterwards – comforting illusion that he'd never let go.

Mycroft – has he missed his brother's call? The alarm clock blinks its default 00:00.  Twilight, but is it dusk or dawn? It's possible he's slept for an entire day.  Mycroft will be angry; concerned.  There's a chance he'll come to investigate in person.  Flare of annoyance, or maybe anticipation – as if the two can be separated where his brother is concerned.

Late or early, all Sherlock wants to do is sleep.  But his headache's back, and the mattress is lumpy.  Too soft – spongy almost – and he has the strangest sensation that he's being absorbed.  Digested.  His fever's rising again.  He needs to focus, to get his mind working.  Wardrobe, television, desk: he knows every inch of this room, has stripped it of all its secrets.

Claustrophobia; rising panic.  Outside, then.  High, excited voices – boys: two, three, four of them – dull impacts on tarmac, on flesh.  Football: predictable; tedious.  Roar of traffic up on the main road.  Babble of voices from the café on the corner, but he can't make out the words.  A continuous current of sound, rising, falling, the occasional shrill of laughter.

Shouting – _bi-salaama_ – goodbye.  The boys are leaving.  All but one: rhythmic slap of leather against brickwork.  Thud, thud thud; over and over, until the noise batters at the inside of his head and every impact makes him flinch.  Is it possible to actually feel the brain swelling?

He's dehydrated.  His flailing hand sends the coke bottles rattling to the floor: empty.  He has to use the table to lever himself upright.  Even his legs are shaking now, but they carry him as far as the bathroom.  The tap sputters.  It's a stupid thing to do, but the water is deliciously cool in his parched throat.  He straightens, until he's level with the mirror, and –

Well, he is a dead man, after all.  The gauntness, the greyness is appropriate; not so terrible once the shock has passed.  And a corpse wouldn't have stubble like that.  Annoying popular misconception: that hair continues to grow after death.

The tiles are cold, stealing the heat out of his feet, and Sherlock's strength seems to be draining with it.  He wants to stay here, to curl up with a towel for a pillow and just sleep.  

It takes the last of his reserves to make it back to bed.

 

The sun is turning the room into a furnace.  The walls shimmer; the red paint oozes, rich and deep as arterial blood.  It's too bright, too much.  Sherlock can actually feel his neurons firing, burning pathways through his cortex.  He's hot, hotter than ever; he's burning.  Spontaneous human combustion.  Rubbish – remember the experiment: the pig carcass; a lighted cigarette; the wick effect.  It's just the fever, just his brain overheating.

He needs to bring his temperature down.  He writhes and kicks – oh god, _everything_ hurts – and finally frees himself from the clutch of sheets and pyjamas.  He checks his skin.  He's stopped sweating – that's bad: dehydration is the constant enemy – and a rash of spots has colonised the hollow of his sternum, spreading down towards his belly.  He smiles: that's new, and new data will lead him to a diagnosis.  But he needs to access the information.  

A dozen well-worn steps lead him to the portico of his palace.  There's a certain comfort in the ritual, but Sherlock hurries through the massive wooden doors.  He's halfway up the east stairs when the walls begin to twist and waver – the outside world, the fever bleeding through.  He presses on through the warped geography of the place, but he's taken a wrong turn.  He rushes through corridors haunted by deleted memories, heading towards safer ground.

There's a door in front of him: white gloss paint, scuffed and battered near the bottom.  It's obvious how he ended up here – he was thinking about the appendectomy, after all – but this is a distraction.  All the same, his fingers inch towards the handle, close involuntarily around the ornate brass.  Sherlock steps into his bedroom twenty years ago.

The door slams shut behind him – but that's all right, that's how it should be.  He locked it after dinner: they would keep worrying, and he just wanted to be left alone.  Sherlock hasn't quite made it to the bed.  He lies, carpet prickling his cheek, curled around the pain low in his right side.  The first knock is careful, restrained.  Mycroft's voice, concern leaking through, and he can be just as tedious as Mummy in his own way.  A shiver of unease: something isn't right.  Mycroft's voice: deeper than he remembers it; deeper than his sixteen years.

A sharp rap of knuckles against wood, then the meaty thump of a fist.  Loud, insistent, so vivid that Sherlock swears he can actually hear it.  The rattle of keys.  They won't work: he left his own in the lock, turned to prevent it being pushed out from the other side.  But the door does open – he feels the rush of air – and urgent feet clatter on the floorboards.  Floorboards – that's not right either.  And Mycroft had to break the door down, flinging his weight at it until the lock splintered away from the frame.

Mycroft's face peers down at him, but he looks so old, so sad.  This is all wrong.  Then Mycroft's fingers are cool against his forehead, and it feels so good, so real, that Sherlock moans out his relief.

A barrage of noise.  Questions: unimportant.  He luxuriates in the touch of Mycroft's skin on his.  But other hands are prodding him, lifting him, pinning him down when he struggles.  He's being wheeled somewhere.  To the ambulance, and he's never been in one of those – except he has, a dozen times at least.  How is he supposed to keep it all straight when his head is pounding?

Rattling; jolting; pain.  Worse than ever, and part of Sherlock wants to leave, to be absent from this.  Sunlight dazzles his eyes, making him wince.  He's outside: petrol fumes and salt breeze.  Waft of grilling fish; his stomach heaves but nothing comes up.  A hand slips into his.  The world's a blur, but he'd know that touch anywhere.

“Mycroft.” He hardly knows his own voice.

Sherlock tries to move, to sit, to pretend he doesn't need anybody's help.  But he's too late; he's years too late.  Mycroft understands, and simply tightens his grip when he tries to pull away.  Sherlock's hands are weak, but he answers that pressure as best he can.

The voices again: Arabic, atrocious French; words of reassurance, but he doesn't need them.  Not now his brother's here.

Sherlock settles, lets his eyes slip shut.  Mycroft's voice, saying his name – his real name – and he hasn't heard it for so long now.  It sounds like home, like safety.  He holds it close and carries it down with him into the dark.


End file.
